A highly competent woman

Plus, a (mostly) newsletter-free summer

(New Yorker cartoon by Sarah Kempa)

When I was growing up, our kitchen was my mom’s command center. The main phone of the house was mounted on the kitchen wall, its mustard-yellow spiral cord hanging down the counter just waiting to get tangled. The family calendar sat on the counter right below the phone, so that my mom could jot down various doctor appointments or social engagements as she scheduled them on the phone. The calendar was consulted for everything. My mom’s handwriting cluttered the 30-odd squares each month with reminders like “Nikki volleyball 3:00” or “Dinner with Peabodys 7:00” or “Dr. Freij Nikki & Michael 10:00” or “Carol bday.” 

Nearby the calendar was my mom’s to-do list. I have never in my life known my mother to not have a to-do list, always on a yellow legal pad but 5x7 or 4x6, not “legal”-sized. This to-do list was constantly updated, items added or crossed off or revised. I never saw it empty or blank; rather, the remainders of the current list would just get transferred to the next page for a new list. An ongoing, neverending list of… things to do.

My mother is highly organized and efficient. She managed all the food shopping, house maintenance, assorted kid / parenting stuff (which was a lot, even back then in the glory days of ‘80s lackadaisical parenting), and social planning, to name just a few, all while also helping run a business with my dad. To do all that, one would have to be highly organized and efficient. 

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I am not naturally gifted at anything cool. I’m not artistically gifted, I’m not musically gifted, I’m not athletically gifted, I’m not mathematically gifted. My college roommate can put together the most amazing outfits (she probably doesn’t even call them “outfits” – geesh, I am very uncool) that are so impossibly chic and hip but also like she didn’t try at all; she just has that sartorial Midas touch. My brother is a culinary genius, an intuitive chef who can throw things together without seeming to think about it too much but you’re in roll-your-eyes-shut heaven when you taste it. My aunts both have seemingly effortless design talents, as seen in their aesthetically beautiful yet totally livable homes. My son is a mathematical mastermind who solves problems in his head that I wouldn’t even know how to go about figuring out with a calculator. 

My gift is much more prosaic than those. I, like my mother, am a highly competent woman. I know, I bored myself just thinking about it. Alas, it is true. I am quite gifted at getting shit done. Organization, efficiency, productivity are my call signs. I’m really good at it.

Also like my mother, I have a to-do list. I have several of them, in fact. I have honed my system over 30 years, going from spiral-bound planners in college (oh, one of my biggest delights was getting my new, blank Illini planner at the start of each school year – such promise in those empty pages) to handwritten lists in my 20s to various Google doc systems in my 30s and early 40s, to my system now, which is a hybrid of the Todoist app, a Google doc, and my Google calendar. I literally cannot function without my system. I would have no idea what to do or when to do it or where to be. My list is never done. It never completes itself. It never ends. It is both stultifying and redeeming at the same time, a heavy chain around my neck and also the thing that keeps me and my life running. 

My lists are not limited to my to-do tasks. I have lists upon lists. “List” is not an adequate description of these documents – they’re more like military operation plans. I have “lists” for holiday planning, holiday entertaining, travel planning, travel packing, food shopping, home furnishing, restaurants I want to go to, places I want to travel to, and more. The list of lists also never ends. I love making lists. When tasked with something, often the first thing I do is make some kind of list. It’s how my brain works – I organize my way out of problems. 

It’s a little embarrassing, no? I’m basically outing myself as a giant try-hard, and I’m okay with that. I realize my listmaking and competency exceeds most people’s, but as I said, this is my gift. Who am I to deny the world my gift?

Now, a particularly observant person, or anyone who knows me really well, might say “Nikki, are all these lists really just a way to maintain your iron grip of perceived control over everything? An attempt to keep the anxiety hounds at bay?” To that person I would say, okay fine maybe, but who am I hurting with my lists? Am I not, thanks to my lists, actually getting shit done?

An astute person, or anyone who has thought about how we socialize our girls and women, might say “Nikki, are all these lists and efficiencies really just methods you have adopted from an early age in order to get the praise you thought you needed as a type-A, perfectionist girl (and later woman) who was striving to meet society’s expectations that girls and women be able to do it all and please everyone?” To that person I would say, okay fine maybe, but it is quite a disappointment to realize that what I thought was my “gift” is actually a coping mechanism in a world that expects our girls and women to take care of everything and everyone.

Regardless, March 2020 came around, and suddenly the speeding vehicle that was my to-do listing came to a quiet, sputtering halt that no one noticed because why would they. Like so many people, I realized I was exhausted, exhausted in a way I’d never been, burned out beyond burnout. I’d been so busy making and crossing off items from my to-do lists literally for decades that I didn’t have time to see how exhausted I was. I can’t say I stopped making lists in 2020, but I certainly slowed down and made fewer lists. I lived more by what the moment demanded and less by what my lists demanded, or what people I pleased.  

Four years later, my lists are at full tilt again. Now, though, I am more aware of my compulsive listmaking and futile attempts to “do it all.” That doesn’t mean that I don’t make the lists – c’mon, that’s crazy talk. But my lists serve as a warning sign for me. When my lists start to feel out of control, I know I’m on the verge of burnout. Pre-pandemic, I would have just stepped up the getting shit done so that I could then get more shit done. But now, whether it’s a result of the weird pandemic slowdown years or just me getting older (and wiser), I know it’s a sign for me to chill the fuck out and maybe not care so much about getting shit done. 

My to-do lists have gone from the minimum of what I thought I needed to get done, to the maximum of what I should even try to do. 

Maybe one day I’ll ditch the app and Google doc and go for an old-fashioned paper planner and yellow legal pad. But not today – I have too much to get done.

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Eating all the popsicles

It’s been almost a year since I launched We’re A Lot. This is the 17th post I’ve published. I love writing this newsletter. I started it because I fiercely missed writing, my first love, and because I wanted an accountability mechanism to keep me writing. I didn’t (and still don’t) intend to charge subscribers and try to make a living from this newsletter (which is not to judge those writers who do that – writing is hard work and should be compensated accordingly), and I didn’t (and still don’t) want to amass tens of thousands of subscribers. 

I just wanted to write. 

Thanks to We’re A Lot, writing is now part of my regular rhythms. I’ve always got a few drafts in progress, and I’ve made time to write, if not on a daily basis then at least weekly. Since I was a kid, the only thing I have ever wanted to be was a writer. And now I’m writing again, even working on a long-gestating memoir.

What I didn’t expect is how much I would enjoy hearing from readers, either via private messages or in the comments. I love the back-and-forth, the engagement, the conversation. I love hearing from each of you about what resonated with you from a particular piece, and I love that different people will have different takeaways from the same piece. So, thank you for these conversations!

That said, there are only so many hours in the day. My consulting business is now at full capacity – this is terrific because, well, living in this world requires an income, and I generally like what I do for my day job. However, this also means that my to-do list alarms are sounding, and I know I’m getting close to burnout potential. 

More importantly, my kid is 11. In the last couple of months, he has been incredibly affectionate and sweet and wanting to be with me a lot. Part of me wonders if he knows at a subconscious level that in just a couple years, give or take, he’ll want space from me, that just the way I chew my food will drive him to levels of insanity he doesn’t know now, that he will want nothing more than to go be with his friends, that in some way, he will lose me just as I will lose him, and I wonder if now he is soaking up those last drops of mom closeness to hold him over in the teen years. Maybe (probably!) I’m just projecting those feelings of my own onto him, but it doesn’t really matter. Because the truth is that time IS slipping away, faster and faster, and I want to make the most of this summer with him. Next summer he’ll be 12. Maybe he’ll still want to hang with me, maybe not. But I’m not losing this chance right in front of me, right now, right here. 

This means I’ve got to prune my to-do list for now. So, I’m giving myself a break from We’re A Lot until after Labor Day so that I can prioritize spending carefree hours with my kiddo while also paying the bills. I might pop up in your inbox a few times here and there if I’m so moved, but I might not. I’m also working on a new writing project that I hope to share with you sometime this summer.

I wish you all delicious, sticky, breezy summers full of whatever you want the summer to be, and I hope you’ll all still be up for We’re A Lot come September. Thanks so much for sticking around this long!

In the meantime, you’ll likely find me kicking my feet up outside somewhere and enjoying my second strawberry-lemonade popsicle of the evening with my son.